High-end graphics cards are getting more affordable, and AMD's top-end* RX 6900 XT is now available at £100 below the model's UK RRP. This particular unit is a Gigabyte OC card, with a 2285MHz boost clock (compared to 2250MHz on the reference design) and a hefty triple-slot thermal solution.
Hello folks. Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written one of these Letters From The Editor. Things have been… manic, to say the least. Manic in the traditional ‘busy’ sense (hello Elden Ring, PAX, V Rising and now notE3 planning), but also in the ‘man, there are so many cool things I want to talk to you about but aren’t quite ready to announce yet’ sense. I’ve been on the cusp of writing about these things every single month since, err, March, but then something falls through, the weeks go by, and we’re back to square one again. So I’m sorry about that, I really am.
What I’m writing to you about today still isn’t one of those exciting things, unfortunately, but it is nonetheless very important. When we relaunched our RPS Supporter Programme last year, we did so on June 17th, which means its one-year anniversary is just around the corner. It also means that those of you who signed up for our yearly supporter tier will be coming to the end of your subscription soon, and I wanted to explain a little bit about the renewal process as it’s… err, a bit convoluted. Sorry again about that.
Over the past few weeks I've sampled so many retro-styled FPSes, I'd class it as a form of training. I'm now attuned to their look, their pacing, their good and bad points. So, it came as no surprise when I found myself testing out the closed alpha of yet another> of their ilk: Ripout, an upcoming sci-fi horror FPS that's very Doom 3.
What's nice is that vidbud Liam joined me! Both because he's a fan of the FPS genre and to be present with a jar in hand, lest I crumbled into dust. Thankfully this didn't happen and we had a pretty swell time, I'd say. It's early days for the game but there's potential there.
CD Projekt have thrown the doors open on the GOG Summer Sale today, and hiding in plain sight is Creative Assembly’s space survival horror Alien: Isolation. The scary stealth ‘em up is the first of a series of games published by Sega that are going DRM-free on GOG. Two Point Hospital and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Anniversary Edition will be joining the store at an unspecified date too.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by several high-speed first-person shooters, some good wizarding, and a cute mushroom friend.
Xalavier Nelson Jr has a bit of a love hate relationship with screens right now. As development on his studio’s gutsy market game Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator was wrapping up at the end of last year, he tells me he remembers “just being really angry at the concept of the borders of the screen”. He was, by his own admission, in “a vague fugue state” at the time, having spent months immersed in Space Warlord’s black and green trading interfaces. But the feeling of having his game “chained to these walls” at the edge of his monitor proved to be a surprisingly powerful one - so much so that it spurred Nelson Jr and his team at Strange Scaffold to create an entirely new kind of game in the months leading up to Warlord’s release: Witch Strandings.
That's right. Taking cues from Hideo Kojima’s hiking postal sim Death Stranding, Witch Strandings is a game that not only asks what Sam Bridges’ cross-country cargo routes might look like if they were made with a fraction of Kojima’s development budget, but also how games can create experiences that are “larger than my screen,” says Nelson Jr. And the answer, it turns out, lies in your PC’s humble mouse.
The developers of survival horror game The Callisto Protocol have announced that it'll be coming out in December, and revealed a new gameplay trailer to watch with the sound off through your fingers.
BioWare have given a new tease for Dragon Age 4, announcing that its official title will be Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. It'll follow up that plot about Solas wanting to destroy the entire world - fantastic news for fans and haters alike.
This week on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we clear up an initial misunderstanding but eventually get in sync and talk about the game things> we'd want in real life: health packs, tetris, inventory management. By their powers combined we manage to create an absolutely nightmarish dystopian society where people live forever but cannot put more than four of the same thing in a line. It's bleak. Games should stay in games.
Matthew continues the Wolfe Carlton saga, Nate is making a crayfish into a mini-model, and I have a cold. A regular cold! No funny business. Matthew also does a very hard Cavern Of Lies this week that honestly nearly has us.
“I haven’t really had time to let it sink in yet, I don’t think,” says Jeremy Fielding, community manager for Stunlock Studios. When we spoke on Tuesday, their early access vampire sim survival game V Rising had just passed 1.5 million players, far beyond the team’s wildest expectations.